Genie

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Franz von Bayros : Manar es-Sana and Tohfe. On an adventurous journey, the young goldsmith Hasan is able to win over a beautiful princess to her wife, but only through a ruse: he robs her of the plumage with which she can transform into a bird, because the princess is Manar es-Sana, the youngest daughter of the mighty great king of the Djinn.

A genie in a bottle is a myth and fairy tale figure. He must serve his liberator for life or grant him a certain number - often three - wishes, usually with certain restrictions. The wish may z. B. only be pronounced once. This motif has been known since the oriental tales from the Arabian Nights and has been widely received all over the world. The genie in a bottle debuts in German literature in Faust. The tragedy part two as a homunculus. Distinguishable from a genie in a bottle is the subservient spirit, who was called upon for assistance as Mephistopheles or magically forced to appear as Paredros .

Origins

The Middle Persian thousand stories , which presumably came from India and already had the structural principle of the frame story , were translated into Arabic in the middle of the 9th century under the title Alf Layla . Later, individual stories were added, such as The Fisherman and the Demon and the cycle of the merchant and the Dschinni, which are said to have brought the volume to a narrative length of 1001 nights. A version from 1150 is documented under the title Alf Layla wa-Layla . Research suspects the beginning of the Arab tradition in Baghdad.

A jinn - sometimes also called a dschann - is considered a Persian motif in the Greek and Arab world of fairy tales. In ancient Greece it is the historically documented, legendary King Gyges , in the Arab region Aladin. Classical narratives of the Gyges material can be found in Herodotus, Xanthos the Lydian and Plato.

Albert Robida (1846-1926). Illustration to Aladdin

In the oriental narrative world, the jinn embodies a spirit that rebelled against higher-ranking spirits and was locked up in a sealed bottle as a punishment, from which it cannot free itself. He is obliged to serve everyone who opens this bottle and frees him. Mortals can set them free by opening the bottle or rubbing it. From 1704 the French orientalist Antoine Galland translated the work into French. He added a few stories, such as that of Aladin and the magic lamp , in which Aladin becomes powerful and rich with the help of the subservient spirit. Galland had these and other additions, such as Ali Baba and the Forty Robbers , dictated into his pen in 1709 by the Maronite Christian Hanna Diyab, who lived in Paris. These 14 additions shape the image that the western world has of the stories from the Arabian Nights, probably more than the Arabic manuscripts of the original source. There are many adaptations of this story in drama, opera, and film.

August Ernst Zinserling translated Galland's work into German from 1823 to 1824. Then came Faust. The second part of the tragedy with the figure of the artificial human homunculus in the vial . Johann Wolfgang von Goethe knew Zinserling.

Meaning and function

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - Pandora

In fairy tales and legends there are a multitude of subservient spirits who are distinguished from one another according to their whereabouts: the Alpine Tattermann, the Silesian Rübezahl and Scandinavia's Troll. In the Middle East there is the evil Dev and the Arab Gül. Despite this regional differentiation, it seems impossible to systematize the spirit world. It is therefore appropriate to start from their function as agents, because despite their heterogeneity, they usually perform the same tasks. In fairy tales they show an optimistic attitude as helpers. In the rather pessimistic saga, people are often defenseless against the subservient spirit. The genie motif as a literary motif is far more optimistic than the related one of Pandora's box . While the genie or genie can be outwitted, the doom of Pandora has been unstoppable since Hesiod .

In fairy tales, the ghost promises to grant every wish as long as the bottle is closed. When open, the contents of the bottle are fatal. In political depictions, the metaphor of the genie in a bottle is often used to characterize a self-inflicted danger. One example is the genie of globalization, which would punish a departure from this development with economic ruin. Payment systems that turn smartphones into digital wallets have been referred to as the genie of subversion in the digital world. In this context, the genie in a bottle serves as an image for self-inflicted consumerism .

There are physicists who call circular entities jinn because they conjure up themselves. In the film Somewhere in Time , the protagonist receives a gold watch from an old woman. Then he takes a trip back in time and gives the same woman in her youth exactly this watch. The question arises as to how this watch came about. It has never been to a watch factory, it has no creator, it seems to be a causa sui . The philosopher Jim Holt says: “The existence of this golden clock is as inexplicable as the existence of the poem Kubla Khan would be if I had traveled back in time to the fall of 1797 and dictated it to a grateful Coleridge, who published it so that I could have memorized it two centuries later. Could anything contradict the principle of sufficient reason more blatantly than a poem that composes itself and a clock that conjures itself up? "

Reception and dissemination of the motif

In 2004 the 300th anniversary of the first European translation of the stories from the Arabian Nights was celebrated. On this occasion, Unesco has put the work on the list of cultural commemorative years it supports. Just like this work, the genie in a bottle also contributed to the constitution of western cultures. It has become a source of the imagination, especially in literature, music, film and painting. In literary studies, this phenomenon is known as orientalism . The western reception has also become a stereotypical expression of a fascinating and attractive side of the Orient and symbolizes the western wish for a happy life. Against this background, behavioral sciences and computer science in particular make use of the western imagination associated with the genie in a bottle.

Beautiful literature

As early as 1796 - around 90 years after the first European translation of the stories from the Arabian Nights by the French Antoine Galland - Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the motif of the jinn for his protagonist in his poem fragment Kubla Khan .

Homunculus in the vial: "What is there to do?" Mephistopheles, pointing to a side door: "Here show your gift" (to describe the dream images of the sleeping Faust) (outline etching after Moritz Retzsch 1836)

In Goethe's Faust. In the second part of the tragedy , Famulus chemically creates a homunculus in his laboratory , an artificial human being who can only survive in a vial . When he comes to life there, he recognizes his father. Then he floats over to Faust in his bottle. Homunculus can read Faust's dreams. He wraps him in the flying cloak and takes him to ancient Greece, where Faust goes in search of Helena. Homunculus has its own travel plans. He wants to get out of his bottle and develop further, i.e. take shape. The forces of nature should help him. He is introduced to the sea god Nereus , who has clairvoyant abilities. He sends it on with the words: “You have to start in the wide seas! / You only start small.” Homunculus can roam the realm of the beginning on the back of a dolphin. He remembers what Proteus said: "Driving the earth, however it may be, / is always just drudgery / Because once you have become a person / then it is completely from me to you."

The Hangman was created in 1810 by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Here, the protagonist Reichard is not the one who banishes the genie in a bottle, but the genius of the bottle who rules Reichard. Reichard is in the role of a young German businessman who finds himself in Venice during the Thirty Years' War. Since he lives there beyond his financial means, he quickly gets into trouble. He meets a Spaniard who shows him a little devil locked in a bottle, namely the little hangman. Any wish that is material will be granted to the owner of the hangman. In return, the devil is allowed to seize the soul of its owner. The only way the owner can get rid of this is by selling the genie in a bottle. He must demand a lower amount of money from the buyer than he himself paid before. In his need, Reichard wants five ducats, and this wish is granted. He's fine, he's going back to his old way of life. When he becomes sick, his desire to recover is denied. Thereupon Reichard separates from the genie in a bottle, he sells it to his doctor. Reichard keeps buying the hangman back in a fateful way. At the end of the story he only pays a penny for it, which means that no further sale is possible, there is no smaller amount of money. Reichard remains at the mercy of the devil.

In the fairy tale Der Geist im Glas by the Brothers Grimm, a conflict between father and son - he studies medicine - functions as a framework plot. The genius in a bottle, borrowed from the story of the fisherman and his demon (1001 Nights collection), is embedded in this narrative framework and connects to the student's genius, which the father misunderstood. The son finds a frog-like creature in a glass bottle in the forest. When he lets it out, the ghost threatens to kill him. With the help of a ruse, the son succeeds in getting the spirit back into his bottle. When the spirit promises him a high reward, he lets him out again. The spirit gives him a small rag which - referring to the imagination of the Middle Ages - can turn metals into silver and heal wounds. This will make the student rich and successful, and become a recognized doctor. In the Middle Ages, a spirit was thought of as a kind of gas that could be compressed and expanded again.

The Brothers Grimm take up the motif of the genie in a bottle in their legend Spiritus Familiaris , referring to the hangman. An Augsburg Rosstäuscher, pursued by misfortune, is persuaded to buy the genie in a bottle. Later, his wife wants him to separate from the ghost again, but his attempts fail: “One night she got up, pulled it out and opened it. A black humming fly flew out and took its way through the window. She put the lid back on and put it in place, not worrying how it would go. From now on all previous happiness turned into the most sensitive misfortune. The horses fell over or were stolen. The grain on the ground rotted, the house burned down three times, and the wealth that had been gathered up disappeared. The man got into debt and became very poor, so that in desperation he first killed his wife with a knife, then shot himself through the head. "

The genie in a bottle: A romantic puppet show for children in a prelude and three acts by Otto Schulz-Heising was first published in Potsdam in 1944.

Astrid Lindgren's Mio, mein Mio (1951) is about the little orphan boy Bo - called Bosse - who does not feel that he is in good hands with his foster parents and therefore goes in search of his father and a real home. In a park he notices a beer bottle that is closed with a piece of wood. Bo knows the stories from the Arabian Nights, and when he removes the piece of wood, a ghost actually comes out. As a reward, he fulfills Bo's greatest wish and takes him to the distant land that is ruled as king by his biological father. As a result, Bo, who is only called Mio from now on, becomes the prince of this empire. The people of the country hope that Mio will free them from the evil knight Kato. Mio, my Mio is a development story as Bo goes from being a shy little boy to a radiant hero. But now Bo has to leave his beloved father again to fight Kato. Kato lives in a land of stone and whoever does not want to serve him will be turned into a black bird.

In The Journey to Tamerland (1984) by Angelika Mechtel , the protagonist Emma arrives in the distant Tamerland with the help of a genie in a bottle. Emma was annoyed by the constant homesickness of her Turkish friend Yüksel. Through her journey, she experiences firsthand what it means to have to live in a foreign country with a foreign culture. The little genie in a bottle, “little carrot guy”, interferes with the plot and helps Emma gain knowledge that she would otherwise not have gained because of her busy parents. The novel describes in a “fantastic” way the challenges immigrants have to face in Germany. “This trip to Tamerland is a very elaborate story, fairytale-like mingles with the soberly observed reality, magic spells and everyday jargon alternate, morality is imaginatively packaged and, at the end of the day, everything turns out well as in real fairy tales. Emma returns from Tamerland with many insights after she has fulfilled the three conditions. She now knows from her own experience why her friend Yüksel is still homesick. Because she learned a lot in Tamerland. "

Jackson Pearce tells in her fantasy novel Three Wishes You Have Free (2010) from the perspective of an immortal Djinn. Leaving his own world, he is sent to a teenage girl who usually wishes she was thinner. Only the chosen one can see it, the jinn is invisible to all other people. The girl is excited and confused, so that at the urging of the Djinn to finally inform him of her three wishes so that he can go back to his land of Caliban, she initially refuses to accept. The teenager got a jinn because she expressed a “true wish” in school, namely “she didn't need to feel invisible”, whatever that means. Instead of making a wish, she asks the Djinn about Caliban. He replies: “Caliban is my world, and I would like to go back to it, thank you very much because I am not getting older there. Djinns age just like humans as long as we are here to grant wishes, which means that by now, I look at the clock, you have cost me seven hours and forty-six minutes of my life. "Seven hours, fifty-three minutes have been since the appearance of the jinn passed without result. The wish fulfilled by a jinn is not permanent. Whoever wishes for world peace - as the girl contemplates - gets it too. But as soon as a gun is fired somewhere, it is over with it. The girl cannot wrest a wish that would make sense and tries to send the jinn away. But he can't go back until she has made a wish. “What happens if I have no wish?” She asks the jinn. "Then I'll die," he replies. This seemingly endless dialogue comes to a head.

In Maja von Vogel 's children's book The Genie Examination (2011), Luis meets a genie in training at a waste glass container. Mick would have to practice a lot before his final exam, but unfortunately he no longer has a bottle. Luis helps him and takes him home with him so that he can prepare for his magic test there. An extraordinary friendship develops between Luis and the genie in a bottle. The children's book has been recommended by the Reading Foundation .

In the fantasy novel Reckless. Lebendige Schatten (2012) by Cornelia Funke and Lionel Wilgram, the subject of the genie in a bottle is used in the chapter on dangerous medicine : Jacob was looking for a place where the inhabitants of the bottle could not grow into the clouds. He decided on the old castle chapel. The resident of the bottle made of brown glass did not come from the south, where bottle spirits can be found at every desert market. It was a Nordic spirit, a particularly vicious and brutal murderer. Jacob needed exactly their medicine. Because they love to kill, they have been locked up and they know that they must serve anyone who walks along and gets their bottle. All their thoughts are on how to kill their master in order to appropriate the bottle for themselves. Jacob released the genie. The genie had hair made of flexible glass, it was worth a fortune in every country behind the mirror. Jacob held the bottle tight. Her glass was so cold it made Jacob's hands numb. "Give it to me," said the genie. Jacob offered him the bottle for a drop of his blood. They agreed. When they argued over who would be the first to keep his promise, Jacob took a moment of inattention and poked the bottle deep into the ghost's nose. There was a fight, Jacob tore the bottle out of the ghost and smashed it on the ridge of the chapel. The mind's body exploded as if someone had filled it with explosives. Jacob had got what he wanted and he was still alive.

music

Between 2011 and 2013, Wilfried Hiller composed the singspiel The Bottle Spirit - a singspiel from Oceania . The libretto, freely written after Robert Louis Stevenson, comes from Felix Mitterer and Wilfried Hiller. The dramaturgical processing was carried out by Elisabet Woska and Nicole Claudia Weber. The world premiere was on January 23, 2014. The novel The Bottle Imp - German: The Bottle Goblin - by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson served as a literary model . At Stevenson, the bottle has to be resold, only for coins and at a lower price than the original purchase price. When the protagonist fell ill with leprosy, he bought the bottle back himself, albeit at a price of 1 cent. Since there is no lower amount, resale that would save him from hell is impossible. However, his wife finds out that there is the smaller currency unit, centime, on the French South Sea islands. But there is no buyer there. In his novella, Stevenson not only takes up the literary motif of the genie in a bottle, but also that of the devil's pact .

The Singspiel is about sudden wealth. Linked to this is the diabolical problem of burning in hell if the genie in a bottle cannot be resold in time. The devil appears in the garb of the clergyman. Wilfried Hiller processed his difficult childhood years in a boarding school in Augsburg.

The children's song The Fisherman and the Bottle Spirit is about a young fisherman who finds an old bottle. Inside there is a ghost that wants to eat the fisherman.

Behavioral sciences

In feminist reflective psychotherapy and pedagogy, the genie in a bottle symbolizes how a core problem of gender relations from the man's point of view could have been solved in earlier centuries: “A man finds an empty, closed bottle on a beach. He takes it and opens it. The result is a genie in a bottle. He says: 'Because you have set me free in this bottle after thousands of years, you can make a wish.' The man: 'Well, I've wanted to go to Hawaii for a long time, but I'm afraid of flying and I always feel sick when I go to sea. Couldn't you build me a road from here to Hawaii? ' The ghost: 'Don't go. After all, that's a few thousand kilometers. That is far too great a wish. Can't you ask for something simpler? ' The man: 'Well then, I want you to teach me how women think. Because I often cannot follow my wife's train of thought. And I often don't know what's wrong with her. Teach me how a woman feels and thinks. ' Then the genie in a bottle hastily: 'Because of the street - did you say two or four lanes?' ”In our present day the question arises whether the comprehensive range of advisory literature is sufficient to help men understand female thinking and feeling.

Daydreams are a method to track down lifelong dreams. A fantasy game gives the opportunity to recognize general tendencies and new possibilities: a genie does exactly what it is asked for. So it is important to describe your wishes as concretely and in as much detail as possible.

Communication on the internet

As early as the late 1990s, the Apollinaris company used a genie in an Internet competition, a dialog robot that is programmed to answer numerous possible questions and answers, thereby simulating the interaction between the user and Apollinaris. As in a chat with a human, the robot always had a suitable answer ready. The resulting dialogue was varied, so that the recipient was motivated to play the game to the end.

literature

  • Brothers Grimm: The spirit in the glass . In: Heinz Röllecke (Ed.): Children's and house fairy tales . tape 3 . Reclam, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-003193-1 , pp. 191–193, p. 485 (final edition with the original notes by the Brothers Grimm. With an appendix of all fairy tales and certificates of origin not published in all editions).
  • Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué: The Hangman: 1810 . Ed .: Heiko Postma. 1st edition. jmb, Hannover 2015, ISBN 978-3-944342-73-3 .

Web links

Wikisource: The Bottle Imp  - Sources and full texts (English)
Wikisource: Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. The fisherman and the demon - A fairy tale from 1001 nights . In the translation by Bruno Littmann, narrated by Maria Becker. DNB  451276515 (speech plate 33 / min, 3 undefined sheets of text added).
  2. The merchant and the djinne, in: Claudia Ott, Muhsin Mahdi: A thousand and one nights in the Google book search
  3. Afnan Al-Jaderi: protagonist and antagonist in Alf Layla wa-Layla. (PDF) November 2011, p. 5 f , accessed on February 21, 2016 (diploma thesis at the University of Vienna).
  4. Lajos Berkes: Gyges and Aladdin - A Persian motif in the Greek and in the Arab fairy tale world. In: Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 48, 2008, p. 263, doi : 10.1556 / AAnt.48.2008.1-2.29 .
  5. Ruth B. Bottigheimer: East Meets West: Hanna Diyab and The Thousand and One Nights. Read Periodicals, July 1, 2014, accessed February 22, 2016 .
  6. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: When Europe invented the Orient. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. October 31, 2014, accessed February 22, 2016 .
  7. Ludwig Fulda: Aladin and the magic lamp. (No longer available online.) Gutenberg project, November 30, 2004, archived from the original on March 1, 2013 ; accessed on February 22, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gutenberg.org
  8. ^ Regest edition of letters to Goethe. Classic Foundation Weimar. Goethe and Schiller Archives, accessed on February 21, 2016 .
  9. Hans-Jörg Uther: On the meaning and function of subservient spirits in fairy tales and legends. In: Lecture given at the 4th symposium on folk tales, Dorf Tirol from 22.-24. October 1987. Subject: The demon and his image. January 1, 1987, accessed February 22, 2016 (limited document preview).
  10. Otta Wenskus : Detours into the Past: Star Trek and Greco-Roman Antiquity. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck 2009, ISBN 3-7065-4661-2 , p. 131.
  11. ^ Lutz Röhrich: Bottle . In: Lexicon of the proverbial sayings . Herder, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna 1994, pp. 1810 ( dwds.de [accessed on February 22, 2016]).
  12. Florian Rötzer: The terror of the economy. Telepolis, August 31, 1997, accessed February 22, 2012 (On Viviane Forrester's passionate pamphlet against neoliberalism and globalization).
  13. ^ Katharina Doebler: Triumph of digital buying. Deutschlandradio Kultur, September 28, 2014, accessed on February 22, 2016 .
  14. Jim Holt: Is there all or nothing? A philosophical detective story in Google Book Search
  15. Ulrich Marzolph: The stories from Thousand and One Nights as a monument to transnational storytelling. (PDF) Retrieved February 19, 2016 .
  16. Klaus Seehafer: Goethe for those in a hurry in the Google book search
  17. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué: The story of the hangman . Romantic stories. Ed .: Johann Gustav Büsching, Karl Ludwig Kannegießer. Munich 1977 ( zeno.org [accessed February 22, 2016]).
  18. Alice Dassel: Interpretations of three Grimm's fairy tales: The spirit in the glass / Die Sterntaler / The brave little tailor in the Google book search
  19. ^ Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Spiritus familiaris. In: German legends. Two volumes in one volume. Munich 1965. pp. 121–123 , accessed on February 22, 2016 .
  20. Otto Schulze-Heising: The genie in a bottle: A romantic puppet show f. Children in 1 foreplay u. 3 files . Voggenreiter, Potsdam 1944, DNB  362692998 .
  21. Mirjam Kurb: Hero and anti-hero in children's literature in Austria, Sweden and Norway - a comparison. (PDF) 2013, p. 77 f , accessed on February 19, 2016 (diploma thesis at the University of Vienna).
  22. Maria Frisé: Mechtel, Angelika: The trip to Tamerland. (PDF) FAZ review (Verbundzentrale des GBV), December 8, 1984, accessed on February 22, 2016 .
  23. Jackson Pearce: You have three wishes. (PDF) Weltbild Verlag, accessed on February 20, 2016 (excerpt from the novel, pp. 1–29).
  24. The genie test. (No longer available online.) Reading Foundation, archived from the original on February 22, 2016 ; accessed on February 22, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.stiftunglesen.de
  25. Cornelia Funke: Reckless. Vibrant shadows in Google Book Search
  26. Wilfried Hiller: The genie in a bottle. German National Library, accessed on February 19, 2016 .
  27. The Genie in a Bottle: A Singspiel from Oceania in the Google Book Search
  28. Renate Ulm: The devil as a missionary. Augsburger Allgemeine, January 24, 2014, accessed February 22, 2016 .
  29. Ulrike Pittner: Thinking, Feeling and Gender-Cultural Awareness in School and Society in the Google Book Search
  30. ^ Jill A. Möbius: Hotline for happiness. Guide to a fulfilled life. in Google Book Search
  31. Julia Schreiber: The Internet as a medium for public relations. (PDF) (No longer available online.) November 1998, p. 69 f , archived from the original on February 22, 2016 ; accessed on February 22, 2016 (master's thesis at the University of Tübingen). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.reocities.com